Components of Adaptive Management

Adaptive Management of ecosystems for production and preservation is a cyclical process with four components: learning, describing, predicting and doing. Learning involves monitoring and evaluation, describing uses models to summarise and represent systems, prediction and gaming are used to test policies and proposed actions, and the doing is done through management experiments. Successful adaptive management needs clear objectives, data and knowledge, the right participants, science skill, willing partners, and money and time. Additionally, in doing adaptive management it is necessary to drive and steer the process, keep momentum, embrace uncertainty, and beware of the danger of half measures. Adaptive management supports decisions and resource allocation, and provides a framework for action directed to changing ecosystem state while learning through and from such change. It focuses conversation and reduces arguments and finger pointing; and also reduces excuses for inaction, provides system understanding, identifies data and knowledge gaps, and sets up a time and space framework for explanation of key processes. Adaptive management won't make decisions, won't do the work or the thinking, and has scientific, social, political and economic aspects that may cause failure, but which, when understood and embraced, provide the framework for successful ecosystem improvement.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic €32.70 /Month

Buy Now

Price includes VAT (France)

eBook EUR 96.29 Price includes VAT (France)

Softcover Book EUR 126.59 Price includes VAT (France)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Preview

Similar content being viewed by others

Ecosystems, Adaptive Management

Chapter © 2013

Adaptive Management Today: A Practitioners’ Perspective

Chapter © 2015

Adaptive Management

Chapter © 2015

References

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. AWRIS Project Director, Bureau of Meteorology, Australia Robert M. Argent
  1. Robert M. Argent
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University, Albury, NSW, Australia Catherine Allan
  2. Retired, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Corvallis, OR, USA George H. Stankey

Rights and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Argent, R.M. (2009). Components of Adaptive Management. In: Allan, C., Stankey, G.H. (eds) Adaptive Environmental Management. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9632-7_2

Download citation

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Get shareable link

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Copy to clipboard

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative